We will survive this, my friend tells me. We have survived worse.
I can agree with his first statement. Neither of us are part of a vulnerable class, our finances are in order, we have psychic resources. We will likely survive. (And I think of Primo Levi's cautioning us that survivors are rarely heroes, that they are shamed by having witnessed acts that indict our species.)
But has it been worse? Maybe. I remember the Cold War, the Kennedy assassinations, riots, Watergate. Maybe it has been worse, but it hasn't felt like this before.
Brooke Gladstone, co-host of the NPR program On the Media, has written a slim book (92 pages, with a list of sources and acknowledgements) called The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time that addresses our credulous post-truth era and how we arrived here. It's worth the hour or so it takes to read.
We should have seen this coming, she suggests, calling back to James Fenimore Cooper and his 1838 non-fiction book The American Democrat. Cooper understood how the press could become--had become--a "great agent of mischief" liable to be wielded by a demagogue.
"The peculiar office of a demagogue is to advance his own interests, by affecting a deep devotion to the interests of the people," Cooper wrote. ". . . The true theatre of a demagogue is a democracy, for the body of the community possessing the power, the master he pretends to serve is best able to reward his efforts . . . The motive of the demagogue may usually be detected in his conduct. The man who is constantly telling the people that they are unerring in judgment, and that they have all power, is a demagogue."
So we have elected a demagogue, if we accept Cooper's definition, which many won't. Because they do not have to. These days we are all free to manufacture our own reality. And, if we aren't up for that, there's always someone willing to supply us with a narrative custom-fit for our bias.
I have a follower on social media who seemingly exists to countermand the actual. Or at least what you believe to be the actual. Everything you think you know is wrong, she says, and your willingness to believe what you perceive with your own senses testifies to your weakness of character.
Another frequent correspondent seems to support the current POTUS because he is POTUS, and so God must want him to be president. Just as God sent Hurricane Harvey to drown the gays. God knows what he is doing. (God did not approve of the last POTUS, which I guess is why Barack Obama is no longer in office.) POTUS is King David. Or Cyrus the Great.
Anyway, by his lights it is heretical to criticize POTUS because God wants us to submit to his authority. Instead we must love POTUS, as Jesus has directed.
Someone else just called into our office demanding to know how Wally Hall had the score of Thursday evening's Razorbacks game in Thursday's newspaper. (He thought he had us.) I'm listening as the most patient (and among the most competent) person in the newsroom, Conley Byrd, explains the nature of prediction.
I get it. There are interesting people everywhere, and the Internet gives them access to the rest of us and tends to amplify their voices. We used to be able to consign them to a colorful heap, to regard them as seasoning characters and cranks.
They have a point. Reality is slippery, and we really don't know what we think we know. (I used to write the occasional "What I Know" column parodying the certainty of true believers but I had to stop because too many of you dear readers were taking the pronouncements seriously. That was when I knew for sure that satire was dead.) All we have is the evidence our senses can gather, and we ought to understand how unreliable that can be. You don't know you're not a replicant like Roy Batty. (And you can't until someone invents a Voight-Kampff machine.)
You don't know that you're not mad and that you're not imagining yourself reading this column. I don't know that this isn't some fever dream I've constructed.
But most us like to think there's something like an objective reality out there, even if all of us perceive it slightly differently. Some of us are blessed with a thrumming faith that sustains us. Some of us suspect that the universe is indifferent to our species. But we can agree that sugar is sweet and some truth is bitter even if we can't claim to have common values anymore. Some people have no trouble with a God that wants them to be rich or a Fortress America pulling up its drawbridge and hunkering down.
I don't know what to say to some of my fellow Americans. There was a time when we were--or at least most of us were-- skeptical of the idea that politics actually mattered all that much. That was before news became entertainment, before politics became sport, before shamelessness became a virtue and it became fashionable to express loud passions in public. Politics was a necessary chore, part of our civic hygiene. I used to feel a little thrill when I voted because it felt like I was participating in something larger than myself.
Now most of us vote in self-defense. Or as an act of aggression. Real people are being hurt. Real people are being threatened. And a lot of us feel impotent. What can we do but call our (craven and opportunistic) congressfolk?
We will survive this, my friend says. We have survived worse. And maybe he is right. But I worry it is different.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 09/05/2017